iTunes error: “You do not have enough access privileges for this operation”

After recently wiping my MacBook Pro and reinstalling macOS, I started getting this error every time I opened iTunes: “You do not have enough access privileges for this operation.”

Though the error is slightly vague, the gist of what’s happening was still pretty clear: there must be a permissions error of some sort. But finding and fixing that error was not as straight-forward as I would have hoped.

Find out what I did to fix the “You do not have enough access privileges for this operation” error in iTunes after the break.

“You do not have enough access privileges for this operation”

The error is clearly caused by a permissions issue. My first thought was to update the permissions on my ~/Music folder. (After that didn’t work, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one that had that erroneous thought.)

I tried several times to change the permissions, to no avail, even after rebooting (of course I tried turning it off and on again).

My colleague saved the day when he IM’d me this glorious terminal command:

sudo chmod -R 1777 /Users/Shared

After that, it was smooth sailing.

Hopefully if you’re having a similar “You do not have enough access privileges for this operation” error in iTunes, you will have an easier time fixing it than I did.